Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Of course, it wasn’t sustainable. Every story of ascent has its reversal. But at that first party on Katie’s rooftop — where tables were laid with such lavishness that they suggested a poverty of refinement, and where no one seemed to know when to laugh or when to fall serious — she discovered a refuge from her mounting dread. For all of Katie’s pushiness (and bad-girl, fame-entranced, youth-worshipping, quick-talking, thick layer of pretense), she was kind. And she had a trace of the startled foal about her. The excitements that spread out over her expanding world were not atrocities, her flashing glance seemed to say; they were flirtations. And if the man who kept her was of a threatening sort, what had she to do with it?

Soon a car was coming for Louisa every other Sunday, whisking her to Katie’s garden on Ady Road, where college lecturers and wives from the British embassy assembled; or to the old Government House, where brashly made-up stars strained to act like children, splashing one another in the pool, gorging themselves on waffles, and pretending at helplessness on the tennis court; or to the Ne Wins’ rooftop, where ambassadors and international types hobnobbed with Katie’s teenage “friends.” And sometimes Katie would tell her, “Go dance with the English fellow!” or “Keep the party going!”

That Louisa was still a child with respect to certain adult matters (that she had only an abstract knowledge of how two bodies managed to become one), that she was actually still largely innocent didn’t seem to matter. It didn’t matter because, in fact, Katie’s parties were only ever about pretense. No one tried to go to bed with anyone within Louisa’s line of sight. She was never even introduced to the ruler himself (who, as “caretaker” of Burma, had moved his troops into government posts, arrested politicians, and deported refugees from the capital to establish “law and order,” while his Defence Services Institute assumed control of banks and transportation and various business interests). No, if Ne Win was present at the parties, it was aloofly, only to putt on the Government House golf course; and if he sometimes ascended to his rooftop on Ady Road, or descended to his living room when guests were there, it was only to coldly converse with one of his generals.

And against this eerie tableau of diversion, in the home of the warden to Burma’s woes, Louisa seemed to arrive at her own temporary solution — to the problem of not knowing anymore when she was pretending rather than simply pretending to pretend, or where her old self ended and her new self began, or if there even was an authentic self to sully with self-deception. As far as she was concerned her previous self — which had sought to cultivate inner beauty and alleviate outer suffering — was dead.

Then one night in 1960, she was sitting alone in her bedroom at the old dressing table that was also her desk, when she looked up to find her previous self staring back at her in the mirror.

A few months earlier, Ne Win had returned the country to the civilian government and called general elections, which U Nu had won again. But there was something doomed about that victory. And as if to compensate for his inherent weakness, U Nu had soon decided to bring a delegation of more than four hundred “luminaries”—including Louisa — to the People’s Republic of China to meet Zhou Enlai. There, endless banquets — held to sweeten negotiations finalizing a border long in dispute between the two countries — had cured Louisa of every last illusion about communism (there was no stronger medicine than to be subjected to ten-course meals under the supervision of the starving, and everywhere on the streets of China there were so many starving). And after her return, she had been sick to her stomach for days, unable to purge herself of the pressure of her growing sense of culpability. Hadn’t she stuffed herself in China because she’d been expected to? And didn’t that describe many a cowardly and evil act? She was no better than any government administrator if she complied with the government’s unjust requirements, never standing up to them.

On this night, she saw in the mirror how pale her face had become, its irises covered over by dark disks, its cheeks hollowed and skin waxen. Yet tears of feeling suddenly filled its eyes, and, as if in response, or in compassion, her hand surprised her by finding the penknife she had been using to open letters and tenderly lifting it to her throat. Through the point of the knife, she seemed to feel her heart begin to pound, and she forced the knife down. But again, her hand lovingly lifted it, now to the fragile, purplish skin beneath one of her eyes. Just one quick, deep slice, an inner voice prodded her.

“Don’t be foolish,” another voice cut in.

It was Mama. Through the mirror, Louisa saw her standing in the doorway, looking remotely back at her reflection.

“Mama—” she started, turning, but her mother drew away, left the room, left her alone with the knife and the tears that suddenly wouldn’t cease falling.

In the desolate hours that followed, Louisa had every ugly thought about herself and her parents. It seemed to her that they were all slaves of their circumstances, living in a kind of permanent estrangement within these walls they shared. Even Daddy. There had been a time, after his release from prison, when she had gone nearly nightly to find him in his study, even though she’d come to believe that nothing could rival his affection for the old peeling desk where he seemed to do battle with his political convictions and his commitment to Mama and the family. From the shadows beyond the doorway, she’d listened as he paced back and forth in the half-light of the kerosene lamp, or as he raved and dashed to the desk to write a line, or moaned and cursed without ever noticing her. “What I believe — what I actually believe — dare I confess it?” he might say to himself on one of these nights. “What I actually believe is that in some ways Nu is right to despise clanism. Don’t I despise it — that veneration of my virtues, my laws, my faith, my heritage, my songs.” Or: “Who are my people? Who, other than the dead?”

Back then, she had told herself that she trusted — and, in fact, did mostly trust — in Daddy’s trustworthiness, in his sanity and courage. But she had also been unable to avoid viewing him through the lens of the courageous man who had temporarily replaced him: Lynton. And though she’d felt like a criminal, she had sometimes longed for Lynton, for his quick wide grin, his decisive laugh, and his steady convictions. “For every day we are given, we owe that day our courage and vigor,” Lynton had once told her, before teasing her for having a piece of rice on her cheek. He was the first person who’d made her feel that he, too, could be unburdened of that thing that seemed to oppress all humans: the desperation to persist, a desperation that could alternately take the form of cowardice and brutishness. And perhaps because she had understood the dimensions of Lynton’s freedom from fear, she had been transfixed by fear of losing him. And when he had finally left them in Bilin, she had secretly wept and made a vow to herself to forgive him — and to forgive herself for caring about him — should he live through the war.

Years had passed since she’d permitted herself such thoughts, or dared to intrude on Daddy in his study. But now, near midnight, with the penknife still beckoning to her, she fled from her room and crept down the dark staircase.

Daddy was there, past the partly opened door of his moonlit study, seated in a chair before the small window that looked out to the wild backside of their property. And he was talking to himself — or talking to God, she understood — as he used to. “Whom to trust?” she heard him say.